BillHustonBlog: Amazing tools for querying NY and PA drilling data, toxic spills, waste tracking & inspections

Here is info about 4 amazing tools,
and some useful things you can learn
by studying the data they report.

If you consider yourself a blogger, journalist,
scientific investigator, or just a curious person,
you might find these tools very valuable.

Please send this info to other people/groups
whom might benefit.

You can learn some amazing things

by querying these databases

and you can do original research
to find (break) important news stories
which have never been in any newspaper.

1: Leland Snyder's PA Spud Database

Leland Snyder has created a way to query
the Pennsylvania Spuds database,
which contains spud date, production data,

waste disposal, and inspections, using

a web form and simple SQL calls.

http://www.localpress.com/dbintro.php

There's a video you can watch to show you

how to make a report and graph it.

With access to the information in this database,

Jerry Action was able to determine there was
very little gas in NY, and where the best prospects
are. (just a sliver a few miles wide, along the
southern edge of Chemung, Tioga, Broome,

and Delaware County NY, along the PA border.

2: Johnny Wunder's NY Well and Spill Wiki

4123 Wells
6885 toxic spills
7 counties (Tioga, Broome, Steuben, Chemung, Chenango, Livingston, Genesee)
12 years

This data is queryable various ways.

What this data shows, by combining these two databases together is that

the history of oil+gas drilling in NY has been associated with MANY
incidents of surface contamination.

3: Wellwiki.org

This is a site very similar to Johnny Wunder's site, only for PA data (like Leland's site),

strangely based in the University of Alberta:

http://wellwiki.org/

4: Laura Legere's dataset of 973 PA DEP Determination Letters

This was the first public dataset, other than the two Consent Agreements between Cabot and the PA DEP
over the well known contamination in Dimock, Susquehanna County, which conclusively showed that the
PA DEP knew water contamination from drilling is pervasive in many counties. Almost 1,000 total complaints,

and 161 were "positive determinations"

Story: http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/sunday-times-review-of-dep-drilling-records-reveals-water-damage-murky-testing-methods-1.1491547
Data Summary: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48182083/ScrantonTT_GW_RTK.csv
The actual letters: http://scrantontimestribune.com/waterproject/1.pdf ... to... 973.pdf

I was able to use this dataset to graph the water contamination complaints in
six counties in NY PA, along with the well locations from the SRBC, to show the hotspots of
drilling in NE PA are also the hotspots of water contamination complaints.

There are many more stories in these datasets just waiting for you to find!

I encourage you to explore these datasets...

--
May you, and all beings
be happy and free from suffering :)
-- ancient Buddhist Prayer (Metta)